The corn harvest!!!!

My square meter corn patch has finally ripened. This weekend I'm home in PA harvesting the fine corn. After some inspection it appears that heirloom corn looks a bit different from regular genetically modified corn. For one thing, no two ears are of the same size. Upon closer inspection it looks like as if even individual kernels on the same ear are differently sized. As I worked in the garden picking beans and corn, I noticed the appearance of a familiar and much detested character. There is this squirrel in my back yard, a scruffy looking thing. He's slender, gray, and has an unusually thin tail. I had already lost several beefsteaks and some corn to this tree rat, and now he's back for more. So I decided to tip toe back to the garage, where I strung up my long bow, and tip-toed back ready for action.

And there he was, sinking his teeth into a small ripening tomato. I tried to get as close as possible but it wasn't long before he saw me. So there I was, being stared at by the critter. So I promptly notched a blunt arrow that I made, drew, took aim, loosed....and MISSED!!!! The squirrel scurried up my neighbor's fence, hopped a few meters and disappeared up a tree. My arrow had lodged itself between the wooden planks of my neighbor's fence. There has to be a better way to take out this villein. In any case, about 20lbs of corn was harvested. 3 ears had suffered some squirrel damage but not too severe. The yield for corn per unit of cultivated area seems to be substantially lower than the yield for potatoes.

Aside from the corn, the beans and tomatoes continued to yield. I picked up 2 tomatos(1 lb) and 4 lbs of pole beans. The onions should be ready for another cutting next week it seems.

Gathering and shade garden update!

The blackberries have been ripening in the nearby forestlands. So I took a short diversion from NYC last weekend to indulge in the art of gathering. After spending much time in the pursuit of berry picking, 2 lbs of the delicious berries were gathered! The only trick to it is to not let the thorns prick one's hands.



Meanwhile, back in the outskirts of Philly, the long neglected shade garden is finally bearing fruit. After planting some beans, bitter melon, and calabash seeds(that I got through barter last year :D) along the backyard fence early this spring, I had pretty much left the shade garden for dead. Surprisingly enough, the calabash plant got along well with the local ivy to produce several small and one large fruit. The beans had entirely failed. The Bitter melons had largely failed but did manage to produce several fruits. This was rather surprising to me since I had expected the beans to succeed and the bitter melon to fail. The reason being that even the cold climate variety of the bitter melon is still far suited to a warm temperate/subtropical growing region than the north east. Bitter melons are distasteful to me, however it is considered a delicacy in certain Asian cuisines. In any event, 5 lbs of calabash and 4 lbs of bitter melon was harvested.


It has been the usual summer week for the organic garden. 4 pounds of pole beans were harvested along with 7 lbs of tomatoes. The sweet corn is beginning to ripen, and I think I must do something to prevent them from being eaten by the furry creatures of the backyard.

Evil furry rodents!!!

I took a trip home to PA this weekend to see my folks and check on the organic garden. I ate a home-cooked meal consisting mostly of captured wild foods and my own garden's produce. There was a hearty beef stew with copious quantities of Garden tomatoes, beans, potatoes, and lettuce. Fine Kennewick potato pancakes were consumed with great relish. And the dish of worthiest note was a platter of wild sunfish(caught at Marsh Creek the day before) lightly fried along with lots of Garden fresh green onions. It was all so fresh and wonderfully delicious!!!


After dinner, I took the opportunity to check on the 2 beds(originally potato beds) that I had recently seeded with turnip and beans. The newly planted turnips and beans are thriving now. I expect the new bean plants to begin producing in a few weeks. This is good in light of the fact that the currently producing pole bean plants seem to have hit their maximum production limit and are gracefully transitioning into old age. The turnips should be ready for harvest around September when the cool Autumn weather transforms the tuber's warm weather bitterness into a delectable spicy flavor. The eggplants have taken quite a beating this growing season. Upon closer examination, I could see that there were numerous bite marks upon the leaves. I know for sure that both Aphids and Japanese beetles have preyed heavily upon the poor eggplants, and I surmise that leaf hoppers have been attacking them as well. The European Eggplant breed is showing very heavy pest damage and no signs of fruit. The Japanese Eggplant is showing somewhat less pest damage and is bearing 4 small white fruits.

The tomato plants are now reaching the peak of their reproductive cycle. There are roughly 150 tomatoes on the vine. Such a quantity of edibles have caused a disturbance in the force so to speak. One of the tomato plants is of the Beefsteak variety while the other is of the Early Girl breed. The Beefsteak breed produces larger, fewer and much sweeter tomatoes while the Early Girl produces larger quantities of smaller more tart tomatoes. Now we all prefer big, sweet, and juicy tomato steaks, and by we I mean humans, bunnies, and squirrels!!! So these small furry critters have dishonorably eaten at least 5 ripe beefsteak tomatoes from my garden within the last week. It is truly a shame that I can't be there during the week to put my archery skills to the test.

In any case, the organic garden is chugging along and producing rapidly. This week's yield was 21 tomatoes (15 lbs) and 2 lbs of beans.

Out of the human hive and into the Wilderness

Last Sunday, I embarked upon a journey away from the human hive that is NYC to the outer peripherals of the state. I have been planning to purchase a piece of undeveloped land for well over a year now, and the time is ripe to set the plan into motion. With rising gas prices and a collapsing housing market, having a fully owned forest or agricultural parcel could have profoundly beneficial effects for one's health and future. So off I went to look at a few properties in upstate New York. At 6am in the morning, I moved myself out of bed, went through the regular motions, and headed out of my apartment. The city scape was largely deserted at this hour. A fine morning fog shrouded the distant skyscrapers, dimming and softening the edges of the horizon spanning mega-city. The metropolis appeared largely deserted, almost ancient in a sense that I found very hard to grasp. The scene from the nearby subway terminal was one of uncommon stillness. For some odd reason, NYC( the economic heart of human civilization) felt a bit like the abandoned Anasazi ruins that I visited 4 months ago. Shaking off such absurd thoughts, I walked down the subway entrance wondering how NYC would look like if 99% of it's population simply vanished.

With great alacrity, I made my way to the Port Authority and onto a Greyhound bus, five hours of road time took me 300 miles west of the city into the small, peripheral center of Utica. From there, I met up with the real estate agent and went to see several properties. Most of these land parcels were heavily wooded with entry points on seasonally maintained roads of dubious quality. I needed an area with some basic qualities: reliable ground water, ample and mature hardwoods, agriculturally productive soil, and (if the gods are kind) surrounding wildlife and fishing resources. Most of the properties seen came far short of what I required.

Finally though, we came upon a very interesting place. The land at first glance appeared to be heavily forested. As I made my way through the forest, I noticed long stretches of low stone walls along the lengths of the forest. I made my way through several hundred feet of heavy woods, the foliage screen suddenly lifted. Before me stood this high, circular, and oddly regular-shaped hill. The hill top was flattened into a plateau of scrub and tall grasses. Making my way to the hill top, I was astounded by the panoramic vista before my eyes. The hill overlooked miles of the surrounding countryside and valley.

I could see the extent of the forests that I had just walked through, the farm next to it, and even the farms and forests far from the main road that led up to this land area. Less than a mile away, there stood this huge derelict-looking radar dish on yet another oddly regular hilltop. The structures upon this land felt subtly strange and even a bit alien to me. It felt as if it was touched by the passing of generations, as if the land itself was shaped by countless hands whose owners I would never meet. Yet at the same time, I felt as if I remember this place somehow, but the memories were jumbled beyond recognition. As we walked back to the car, the real estate agent casually mentioned that the radar dish was built by the military in the 1960s and that it has long since been deactivated. The man then went on a rant about how this wouldn't affect the real estate's future value and such. And all of a sudden, EVERYTHING fell into place.

There was the forest at first. Then men came, with stone hatchets the forest was turned into farmland divided between incessantly warring tribes and confederations. The land that I stood on was part of the vast the Oneida confederation, a polity that spanned a third of this state. To the East they faced the Mohican tribes, to the West there was an alliance of Huron chiefdoms. The mound that I stood on was an old Oneida military hill fortress. For centuries they fought their savage wars, and then a great sickness spread across the land, cutting down the populace like weeds. For a century afterwards, the few people that remained lived by hunting, gathering, and limited gardening. The forest swallowed this land. And then other men came, waves of Anglo Saxons, followed by Germans and European lowlanders. After many bloody wars with the first settlers, the Germanic peoples were victorious. The forest appeared virgin to them, and they proceeded to clear the trees with steel and grit and put the country to farmland once more. Using muscle power alone, these Germanic peoples built the old stone walls which marked the boundaries of their farms. Generations passed, and change swept the land yet again. The industrial revolution was upon the land. The descendents of these farmers could not keep their ancestors' small farms. They were thus pushed into the teeming cities. Generations passed and the forest once more swallowed the achievements of man's labor. And then once more people came, this time the world was divided between two great nations. Proud and hostile, they tried to gain dominance over one another through the possessions of nuclear tipped missiles. The Americans rebuilt a paved road into this forest, they saw the hold Oneida fort hill, and placed a radar installation on top of it's summit. This radar, along with many other, created a vast sensory network. The Soviet ICBMs could thus be monitored coming over the Northern polar cap and a prompt retaliatory strike launched in time. The war never came and the radar along with the land fell into disuse. The forest came once more and cleansed all.

So trapped was I in the depth of my own ruminations that I stumbled upon stick bushes filled with raspberries and blueberries. Between the berry patches were trees growing hundreds of green crab apples. I picked pounds of the delectable berries and apples and took them all home with me. It was a good day!

Garden update...and some bartering :)

A great deal of food has been produced this week by the tiny organic garden. Since, I'm away in the city, my parents have been harvesting from the beds on a daily basis. The 4 green onion plants continued to produce at a brisk pace. 2 pounds of onions were harvested this week. The pole beans are producing at a furious pace. Over the last week, over 20 lbs of pole beans have been harvested. The two tomato plants have begun producing in earnest.



























32 Tomatoes(12 pounds) were harvested in the last week. There are roughly another 180 hanging on the vine.


























Our neighbor Jeff has taken a keen interest in the organic garden and has started one himself this year. His set of food crops were a bit different, with way more cabbage, squash, and cucumbers than beans or tomatoes. As such Jeff had a surplus of cucumbers while we had an excess of beans. A quick bartering session resulted in 5 lbs of pole beans for 8 lbs of cucumbers.

Beans, beans and more beans!!!

The European pole beans have entirely displaced the North American Kentucky variety within the garden. The new bean seedlings have grown remarkably fast within the last week. The Japanese beetle threat seems to have greatly diminished. With the potato harvested and the Native American bean plants consumed to death, the beetles seems to destroyed their own food supply. Within a week, what had once been a population of hundreds of eating, fighting, and mating beetles have been reduced to just a handful.

With the beetles gone, the surviving European pole beans are now producing in force. The trick to harvesting large amounts of beans is to not allow the seed pods to grow large and harden. If that ever happens, chemical changes will alert the bean plant that it's reproductive cycle is complete. And when that message is communicated, the bean plant will cease to produce any more beans for us to eat. By harvesting young and tender beans, the plant is tricked into producing more and more offspring(beans) to make sure that some of them will make it. This of course produces great yield.

So over the last 4 days, the garden has produced a total yield of 3 pounds of beans. This trend will hopefully continue until September. By late August, the new bean plants set down a week ago(on the potato bed along with the turnips) will compensate for the declining yield of the first wave of beans planted in May. This type of succession planting can serve to ensure a very stable and reliable supply of a protein rich food.

The Potato Harvest and Friends!

I decided to head back to the burbs this weekend to harvest my potato crop. On saturday morning, I glanced at my organic garden after a 2 week hiatus in the city and saw a blend of the expected and not so expected. For one thing, the potato plants have more or less browned out, the later maturing varieties looking obviously healthier and less aged than the early maturing breeds. All 3 Potato varieties were ready for harvest. The Corn was looking gloriously vibrant, a dozen man-height corn stalks shot out of the square meter garden bed. The beans were not doing so well. Most of the beans have been damaged by potato beetles, for some reason the pests prefered to eat the bean leaves over potatos. Upon closer inspection, I realized that the native American Kentucky Wonder pole beans were almost entirely wiped out by the bugs, while the European pole beans were only lightly damaged. The discrepancy was glaring, it seemed that just about 1 out of every 2 beans plants have been reduced to skeletonized leaves. While the native American bean plants were all looking like the living dead due to these Eurasian pests, the Eurasian bean plants were only slightly pockmarked by the same beetles.

In short order, I got into the act of harvesting the potatos. It was moderately back-breaking work. Each potato plant was first yanked out of the soil with much of it's root structure. The smaller and moderately sized potatos usually came attached with the plants' roots, the larger potatos were at least dislodged. The individual potatos were collected, and the potato leaves/roots/stems carefully sequestered into it's own pile. It was of utmost importance to remove as much of the potato root structure as possible from the garden bed. The roots, if left in the earth, acts as a disease vector for potato family crops. However, it is also important to maintain the clover and onion ground cover on those same garden beds thus complicating the harvesting effort. After half an hour of harvesting, I had unearthed the entire potato crop.

The 3 breeds of potatos planted all had very specific individual traits. One can almost see the engineering trade-offs made as each variety was selectively bred by humanity. What traits were picked and which ones were discarded all depended on what the people were seeking in their environment. The Yukon Gold breed of brown-skinned potatos clearly scored highest on total yield(over 30% more than the other 2 types), but took weeks longer to mature and showed noticeably more susceptability to beetles and fungus. The Roten variety matured the quickest, demonstrated great pest resilience, and produced a good yield of big, red, and super-starchy taters . But those advantages were offset by the fact that each Roten potato plant was 30% larger than the other varieties, thus decreasing the total number of potato spuds that can be efficiently planted on the same surface area. And then there was the Kennewick breed, it was relatively slow maturing, it's yield was the lowest, it showed the most pest/fungus damage of all. To top it all off, the potatos seem to grow really deep under the plant structure, thus making it a pain to dig out. However, there are redeeming qualities to the Kennewick. These pale white potatos are, without exception, very well proportioned(not too big or small), unlike the other breeds. The Kennewicks are also possessed of this very smooth, almost tender white skin that contrasts very sharply with the rough and thick skins of the Yukon Gold and the Roten. One could almost imagine that the Kennewick variety may have been selectively breed as some sort of elite status food. I gathered up the potatos and put them onto a flat bench in my garage to dry off. After half a day of drying, those potatos can be put into the cellar and kept for many months. All in all, the yields were 31 lbs of Yukon Gold, 23 lbs of Roten, and 19 lbs of Kennewick, a total of 73 pounds of potatos cultivated from 2.5 square meters of earth.

With the potato harvest completed, I decided to see if I couldn't recoup my bean plant losses. After seeing the selective damage done by the Japanese beetles, I launched a genocidal campaign against these bugs. Gloves in hand, I combed through the entire garden and killed every single Japanese beetle that I found. I gathered hundreds of their tiny corpses in a cup, mixed in a bit of water and grounded them into a fine paste. Most of this liquid fertilizer, I dumped into the compost mounds, but some of it I saved for what I had in mind. I quickly replanted European variety pole beans at the sites of the dead Native American bean plants, And to jump start the bean growth process, I added some of the diluted beetle puree to each bean seed as I planted them. As the beetles have so heartily fed on the defenseless beans in life, so shall they, in turn, be feed to the beans in death. As I was doing this, I harvested about half a pound of pole beans, 2 fallen green tomatos and a pound of green onions.

With the bug-fighting campaign out of the way, I started working on my hot composting bins. Taking the 2 potato growning containers, I methodically applied a layer of dirt followed by a layer shredded potato plants/lawn grass/leaf clippings/kitchen vegetable clippings for some 4 iterations per container. After which, each container was given a cups of diluted urine to jump start the decomposing process. Finally gallons of water was applied to each compost bin, and then both bins were covered with hemp fabric to keep it extra warm and toasty inside. Last summer I was able to see some luminous biomatter coming from the compost bins during the hottest summer months. This year, I plan to get a few snapshots of it. So it was not too bad for a day's work in the garden.

More Food and Organic Garden Update!

Today, about 1/2 pounds of green onions were harvested from the garden. The Onion greens can be harvested continuously through the summer and early fall. After which the underground Onion tubers can be extracted with a final harvest. I had intended to plant some more herbs such as basil and thyme, but didn't quite get the time to do so. In the rest of the garden, much has transpired. Almost all of the crops are flowering, making the garden look like a giant series of flowering bushes.


The early and mid season potatoes will be ready for harvest within 2 weeks. The late season potatoes will be ready within 4 weeks. The idea here is to stagger the planting of a secondary crop of potatoes into 3 phases, which would result in another 3 harvests later this year. One troubling thought is the effect of the potato harvests upon the surrounding bean plants, since the beans have formed a symbiotic relationship with the potatoes, the removal of the taters may make the beans more susceptible to pests.

The crop trinity in Garden Bed one is doing very well, the Eggplants are flowering profusely and will soon bear fruit. The pole beans have climbed up each and every corn stalk and are also flowering like crazy. Everything is so tightly integrated that this network of crops looks as if it's a single, complex plant. The corn stalks have sent up strong stalks with broad emerald leaves, the beans clamor along the sides of those stalks, and the ground beneath is entirely covered by eggplant leaves, not a square inch of sunlit space is wasted by this system. The corn/bean combination I think can be left there until the end of the agricultural season this year. The beans will produce until October, and the corn will be ripe by then as well. The eggplants after the august harvest may be turned under the soil and replanted with either sugar beets or winter kale. I plan to seed Garden bed one with some other leafy vegetable combination next year, and if the gods are kind, another intensive crop of potatoes the year after to form a full rotation.

Garden update and First Harvest!!!!

Today, we harvested the lettuce heads from the garden. They have developed into very large and tall green structures, replete with rich green leaves. Of the 9 saplings that I started indoors, 6 of them made it to the garden bed, and 5 of which survived into maturity. Each head of lettuce is between 2 to 3 pounds in weight. Overall around 14 pounds of lettuce was harvested. The lettuce heads were quite leafy, and free from much pest damage. Apparently, the dragon flies have really done their jobs over here. The surprising point to note here is that the overall space that the lettuce took was about a quarter of a garden bed, or roughly .25 square meters. There is perhaps more than a month worth of salad greens here for one person.


The area in garden bed 2 that was previously devoted to the lettuce crop was immediately sown with an Northern Indian variety of Lentil seeds and covered with leaf mulch to conserve moisture and to prevent soil erosion. The lentils will mature and yield a continuous harvest through summer and early fall, after which it'll be turned over and replanted with beets and/or turnips for an early winter harvest in November. Thus a continuous and intensive flow of foodstuffs out of the garden can be provided from March to November. What is more miraculous is that such a small area of soil will be able to maintain it's fertility while producing so much food.

In other areas of the garden, several crops are getting ready to produce. The Onions will be ready for a continuous harvest within a week. The early maturing Roten Red Potatos will be ready for harvest within 2 weeks. All of the potatoes will be harvested within 4 weeks and a second potato crop would need to be sown for an early October harvest. The tomato plants are producing dozens of small green tomatoes at this point. Maturation of those tomatoes will occur beginning in July, thus providing a continuous tomato harvest until early October. The beans, I'm not expecting to see a crop until mid July at the earliest. The eggplants will be even later.

Now that my organic garden has entered it's primary production phase, I have been expecting a good deal of damage from the usual depredations of marauding children. And so far they have not failed to live up to expectations. Several days ago, someone passed by the garden and tore up 2 corn plants and incurred significant damage to 3 potato plants. Thus 10% of my corn crop is now lost. It was obvious that this person had intended to kill the potato plants as well. One thing that I have observed however is that Potatoes are extremely hardy, within 3 days, the significant leaf damage done by the trespassers have been completely repaired by the plant itself, all 3 of the damage potatoes have fully recovered. For the gaping areas left by the corn plants, chick pea seeds were immediately sown as a cover crop and leaf mulch applied at once. The chick peas be ready for harvest around August. There needs to be some measure of security for the garden to prevent future human raiders.

A mid-summer night's post

It has been a while since my last post. Much has happened in the meantime. I moved into a major city and started some indoor miniature gardening efforts there. I came back to the suburbs today to check on my organic garden beds. It appears that much has transpired in the last 3 weeks. The garden is at last beginning to resemble a miniature jungle, complete with a multi-tiered vegetation canopy. There has also been a degree of pest damage in some areas, but nothing too severe.


Garden Bed 1 has developed into a robust crop "trinity" system. The corn stalks have grown up very well. The pole beans are sending intricate tendrils up and around the cornstalks, using them as a living support structure. The eggplants have grown much larger as well, spreading out to cover most of the exposed surface area between the beans and corn plants. The entire "design" is incredibly efficient. The corn supports the beans by providing a super-structure, the beans support eggplants and corn by fixing nitrogen into the soil, and the eggplants serve both corn and beans by providing ground cover which conserves soil moisture. What is more amazing is that corn, beans, and eggplants, provide carbohydrates, protein, and vitamins respectively: the necessary components of a complete nutritional diet. The corn and the beans are remarkably free from disease. However, upon closer examination one can see that the eggplants have suffered a degree of damage from black flea beetles. All of the eggplant leaves were perforated with small holes made by the beetles. The significance of the damage seems to have been mitigated by some dragon flies. These young dragon-flies were hovering like attack helicopters over the eggplant leaves, every once in a while one of them would swoop down and capture a flea beetle for lunch.


Garden Bed 2 is developing along similar lines. The tomatoes have grown to be twice as tall as they were during my last post. The Lettuce heads have developed into huge(basketball-sized) plants, they should be ready for harvest within several weeks. The pole beans have grown up and around the bamboo and metal scaffolds, as well as around the tomato plants themselves. The onion chives have grown to be over a foot tall. The tomatoes, pole beans, and onion chives seem to be flowering at the same time. As such, large numbers of bumble and honey bees were flying around Garden Bed 2. Overall, there does not appear to be any significant pest damage in Garden Bed 2.

Garden Beds 3 and 4 have turned into complete jungles. The Potato plants in those beds have grown to be over 4 feet high. Pole beans have managed to climb up every single bamboo support pole, and several of the potato plants themselves. Large portions of the ground layer of both beds seem to be carpeted by lush green onion chives blades. Both of these beds have become edible jungles of sorts. The potato/bean/onion combination seemed to have warded off a great deal of pest damage. I'm seeing the usual assortment of pest insect characters, but their effects have so far been quite minimal upon these two beds.

As I'm writing this entry, I can't help but marvel at the incredible level of bio-diversity that has developed in this "perma-culture" garden . Last year, I was impressed that there seemed to be several times more insect species in the one garden bed than generally found on the lawn. This year, there seems to be an order of magnitude increase in the variety of insect species found in my garden. It is particularly contrasting as this side-by-side picture demonstrates between the jungle-like organic garden and the savanna-like lawn.

I looked at every tier of the canopy system, and took careful notes of the species seen there. And here is what I found:

Ground Surface Tier
Centipedes, Pill Bugs, Mole Cricket, Snails

Ground Cover Tier (onion chives, green onions, herbs)
Caterpillars, Grasshoppers, Ants, Praying Mantis, Weevils, Fireflies

Intermediate Canopy Tier( Cabbages, Potato/Tomato stems, Bean tendrils)
Potato Bugs, Japanese Beetles, Fruit Worms, Moths, Army Worms, Spiders, Soldier Bugs, Lady Bugs, Orius Bugs, Cucumber Beetles, June Beetles

Leaf-top Canopy Tier( Tomato/Potato/Eggplant/Pole Bean leaves)
Aphids, Flea Beetles, Gnats, Green Lacewings, Flies, Leaf Beetles, Dragon-Flies, Honey Bees, Bumble-Bees, Wasps, Fruit-Flies, Leaf Hoppers, Leaf Worms, Midge-Flies

A total of 37 insect species were easily identified in a Garden whose total surface area is barely 6 Square Meters. Conversely, I did a similar examination of the mowed lawn just a few feet away, and came up with a total of 3 insect species(ants, grasshoppers, fireflies). Such a disparity was quite shocking to me. The lawn, in ecological terms, is akin to a barren desert compared to the Garden.

Imagine this, we spend precious fossil fuels in the forms of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and lawn-mowers to create a nearly life-less desert in our backyards. The lawn produces nothing, but takes constant and massive amounts of energy to maintain. We should all be trying to turn our backyards into garden ecosystems, free food and an abundance of wild-life beats wasting gas and money any day of the week!